Tom Chatfield on video games: difficulty is the point, not the problem

Difficulty is built into video games in a different way than for
any other medium.

A movie may be difficult, conceptually or in terms of subject
matter; it may be hard to understand or to enjoy. Yet all you have
to do to access its entirety is to sit and watch from beginning to
end.

Written words can be still more difficult. For these, you need a
formidable mastery of language, concepts and context; you must
convert text into sense. Still, the raw materials are all there for
you to work with. You do not have to pass a tricky test in order to
get beyond the first chapter, or find yourself repeatedly sent back
to the start of a book if you fail. You do not have to practice
turning a page at precise moments in order to progress.

Yet this is what the difficulty of many video games embodies: a
journey that the majority of players will not complete, filled with
trials, tribulations and inexorable repetitions.

There's no one agreed-upon definition of a video game, or indeed
a game, but Bernard Suits's phrase "the voluntary attempt to overcome
unnecessary obstacles" captures a good deal of what matters. A
player contends with obstacles according to a set of limiting rules
-- and does so, in the case of a video game, by entering a virtual
realm that itself embodies those rules.

When writing well about almost any video game, authors
are more like anthropologists reporting from the boundaries of a
brave new world than critics dissecting a work of fiction. Their
data is fieldwork, their analysis mixed with reportage, their most
precious skills the arts of looking, listening and recording

Tom
Chatfield

A good game is one that is rewarding to play;
where the journey of discovery and incremental mastery is balanced
between excessive frustration and simplicity. There may be many
incidental delights, but without some measure of difficulty and
repetition there is no heart to the game: no mechanic inviting
iterative exploration or breeding the complex satisfactions of
play.

Yet video games are not only difficult to play. They are also
difficult to write about and to discuss, and for related
reasons.

For a start, they embrace aspects of many other media and
disciplines: images, sound, music, text and speech, architecture
and design, animation and modelling, interface and interaction,
social dynamics and artificial intelligence. This brings a
bewildering -- and rich -- load of baggage to a field that has only
existed for around half a century. Like players, the would-be
investigator of video games is often running in order to stay
still.

Time is of the essence when it comes to almost every aspect of
the field. Even the most difficult works of literature or
philosophy tend to take at most tens of hours to read. Yet far
simpler games can demand a hundred hours or more of play if they
are to be exhaustively explored, while some online games raise the
pitch of this expertise to thousands (hello, EVE).

Then there's the fact that games themselves don't stand still.
With patches and expansions standard across the industry, and
player communities constantly evolving, many titles consist of a
steadily updated environment and evolving social context. What does
it mean to study the definitive version of a game, or come up with
a universal system of reference for research in the field? Are
aging games to be understood in emulated form, or on original
systems? What does it mean to play a game outside its original
context?

These are awkward questions. Yet addressing them doesn't just
demand the exhaustive amassing of software and hardware. It also
means paying close attention to the only place in which a game
truly exists as itself: the minds of its players.

When writing well about almost any video game, authors are more
like anthropologists reporting from the boundaries of a brave new
world than critics dissecting a work of fiction. Their data is
fieldwork, their analysis mixed with reportage, their most precious
skills the arts of looking, listening and recording. Simply Google
" vanilla WoW" to find a trove of tales about the first version
of World of Warcraft, for example: a vanished world of
slow-levelling and epic corpse-runs that now lives
only in memory.

Similar reminiscences are everywhere in gaming, their genre
somewhere between confession and myth-making. Talk to someone about
even something as banal as Candy Crush
Saga, and the passions will soon start to flow: what
levels they love or hate, where they're stuck, when and if they
weakened and bought their way out of trouble.

Indeed, some games can touch us sufficiently deeply to be
labelled an addictive hazard -- and to suggest a special species of
reverse-engineering, in which systems expressly designed to
challenge and enthral us become an extraordinarily concentrated
chunk of experience. Set apart from actuality, games are a machine
zone that can be refuge, meeting place or unfallen Eden; and within
which we at once the heroes and narrators of our own journeys.

You can talk, then, about a game's art, politics, script, music,
sounds, making, impact, legacy, sociological significance, and all
the intricacies of design and data that conjure these. But you
should never forget the fundamental contract every game seeks to
forge with its players: accept this world and these obstacles in
the name of experience, and make of them what you will. Difficulty
is the point, not the problem. The play's the thing.

Tom Chatfield is a British author and commentator,
most recently of How to Thrive in the Digital Age (Pan
Macmillan) and Netymology (Quercus). Follow him on Twitter at
@TomChatfield. A
version of this piece first appeared in Early Modernity and Video Games (Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, February 2014), edited by Tobias Winnerling and Florian
Kerschbaumer.